But though the Whigs were defeated in Parliament, they took their revenge outside. The ignorant mob was told that the peace was the first step towards despotism, the despotism of the Princess-Dowager and her led-captain Bute, and the torrent of abuse swelled in volume. One evening when the Princess was present at the play, at a performance of Cibber's comedy, _The Careless Husband_, the whole house rose when one of the actresses spoke the following lines: "Have a care, Madam, an undeserving favourite has been the ruin of many a prince's empire". The hoots and insults from the gallery were so great that the Princess drew the curtains of her box and quitted the house. Nor was this all. In Wilkes's periodical, _The North Briton_, appeared an essay in which, under the suggestive names of Queen Isabella and her paramour "the gentle Mortimer," the writer attacked the Princess-Dowager and the Prime Minister. Again, in a caricature entitled "The Royal Dupe," the young King was depicted as sleeping in his mother's lap, while Bute was stealing his sceptre, and Fox picking his pocket. In _Almon's Political Register_ there appeared a gross frontispiece, in which the Earl of Bute figured as secretly entering the bedchamber of the Princess-Dowager; a widow's lozenge with the royal arms hung over the bed, to enforce the identity. Worst of all, one night, when the popular fury had been inflamed to its height, a noisy mob paraded under the windows of Carlton House, carrying a gallows from which hung a jack-boot and a petticoat which they afterwards burned (the first a miserable pun on the name of John Earl of Bute, and the second to signify the King's mother). The Princess-Dowager heard the uproar from within and learned the cause from her frightened household. She alone remained calm. "Poor deluded people, how I pity them," she said, "they will know better some day."